


in which logan and patton cuddle for warmth

by whimsicaltwine



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Hurt Morality | Patton Sanders, Hurt/Comfort, Hypothermia, M/M, Mutual Pining, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:26:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21652231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whimsicaltwine/pseuds/whimsicaltwine
Summary: When Patton and Virgil, a photographer and reporter duo, get the chance to do a story on Patton's online friend, Logan, who is doing research in northern Alaska, they take it.  Patton can't wait to meet Logan in person for the first time, but when he falls in a frozen lake, being far away from him becomes the least of his problems.
Relationships: Logic | Logan Sanders/Morality | Patton Sanders
Comments: 26
Kudos: 147





	in which logan and patton cuddle for warmth

**Author's Note:**

> Constructive criticism welcome - I'd love to hear what I did well and what I can work on :)

“Oh, wow!” Patton exclaims, lifting up his camera to take a few quick shots. Logan’s spent months surrounded by the glittering snow, and so the majesty of it all has long since worn off, replaced by a stubborn sort of annoyance that won’t abate no matter how many times he tells himself that he loves the work he gets to do here and that the cold and snow are unavoidable parts of it, but to Patton, who has only been here a few days, it’s wonderous.

As he watches the way the fur trim on the hood of Patton’s coat flicks back and forth in the wind, as if glitching, Virgil stumbles up next to him, grumbling. The microphone clipped to his coat is no doubt picking up mostly the sounds of his struggle up the hill, and it hasn’t even managed to serve its purpose yet; they walked up to the lake in silence, with only the sound of their footsteps for company as they trekked on through the snow. Now that they’re here, Virgil pulls a notepad and pen from his pocket. While Patton’s camera snaps away from a few feet ahead of them, Virgil scans the landscape, taking in each and every detail; the sounds and sights, the way the cold bites at their cheeks, the vast expanse of clear blue sky that arches over them, committing it all to memory. Maybe he’s already thinking about how he might describe them. Logan walks up to Patton.

The coat he’d gotten for the trip is, predictably, a shade of light blue that matches the crisp and sharp winter sky almost exactly. He’s taken his gloves off to work his camera, which Logan has come to expect; four years of friendship is a suitable sample size to gain a sense of a person’s habits, even if the two people in question have only ever interacted over the internet. “We haven’t even seen any caribou yet, Patton,” Logan points out, his voice muffled by his scarf. “Aren’t you concerned about running out of storage space?”

Giggling, Patton lowers his camera and turns to Logan, smiling. He’d given his scarf to Virgil a while back. “That’s why we bring more than one sim card. I can take so many pictures,” he continues, raising his eyebrows as his voice takes on an expectant tone that Logan has come to dread over the years, “it’s sim-ply amazing!” Logan groans.

“Oh, come _on,_ Logan! You know you love me.” A moment passes in silence. Logan stares at his feet. After presumably deflating, his shoulders slumping and his bright smile sliding off his face to land, forlorn, in the snow, Patton speaks softly, like he’d rather not even say anything at all. “Sorry.”

“It’s quite alright, Patton,” Logan says. Just as something as cold as the snow he stands in settles firmly in his chest, Virgil trudges up the last couple feet to join them at the edge of the lake, still gripping his little notebook and the pen that Logan has privately given a life of two hours before someone inevitably drops it in the snow and loses it forever, and without a small amount of fanfare, sets himself next to Logan.

“I am sick,” he says, tugging his scarf — and Patton’s — tighter around himself, “and tired of Alaska. It’s fuck no degrees outside—“

“Actually, it’s negative eighteen degrees Celsius and negative two degrees Fahrenheit—“

“and I am hiking through the middle of nowhere. You better be thankful for this, Patton.” All bundled up in a thick black coat, Virgil waddles through the snow like a marshmallow man, with fabric bunching up around his knees and elbows and shoulders as he complains his way through the hike, his face almost entirely hidden by his hood and the two scarves he’s wrapped himself in. 

Logan furrows his eyebrows, confused. “But weren’t you the one to propose doing this story so that Patton and I could meet each other for the first time?” Patton giggles.

With what Logan thinks is probably a glare — it’s hard to tell with Virgil’s face obscured by so many layers of fabric — Virgil waits for a moment in silence before, with a vigor that would be quite improbable for someone freezing to death to achieve, spitting, “Shut up.” Well then. Reaching up to adjust his glasses, his fingers clumsy in his gloves, Logan shrugs and walks on ahead. Virgil can complain all he wants, but the fact remains that they still have several hundred meters of cold, snowy forest to traverse before they get to the clearing where their subject resides.

Logan’s walked farther in worse weather. He can only get so far in his truck before he starts running the risk of scaring away the animals he’s studying, which means that over the four months he’s already been here, he’s gotten used to trekking through the snow with a heavy backpack secured on his shoulders, feeling the cold start to seep through his boots and socks until it bites at his fingers and toes. At this point, the feeling of the sharp air on his face is too familiar to be a nuisance.

Patton studies the lake. It’s almost as if he’s looking through a camera lens even when he’s not taking pictures; Logan can see him mentally lining up shots and mulling over framing, already lifting his camera back up while simultaneously changing the settings with movements so familiar they’ve become automatic, but to his surprise, he doesn’t start snapping away at the frozen lake ahead of them. Instead, he turns to Logan with a grin, calls, “Say cheese!” and forever immortalizes Logan looking like someone has just opened a door right as he’d reached up to knock, his face frozen in a baffled sort of surprise. Virgil snorts as Patton giggles with a sound like little rocks bumping and clicking against each other.

“Yeah, you’re gonna need to send me that one, Patton,” Virgil says. If he weren’t wrapped in so much fabric that only his eyes are visible, Logan thinks he would have a seen a lopsided sort of smile on his face. “It’s vital to my continued existence.” Logan squints.

“Virgil, that makes no sense.”

“It makes perfect sense. You just gotta… feel it on an emotional level,” he explains, extending his hands in a motion that reminds Logan of his nephew’s famous demonstration of how “bad guys sneak like snakes.”

“I think you’ll find,” Logan starts, turning to watch Patton stumble down the little hill with clumsy, cheerful footsteps, his legs kicking their way through the deep snow until he finally makes it out onto the edge of the lake, where he promptly takes out his camera and starts turning in circles in search of his first subject, “that I don’t have much talent when it comes to, as you say, ‘feeling things on an emotional level.’”

Huffing, Virgil says, “Fine, I’ll see if I can translate it into nerd-speak for you; saying it that way changes the connotation. Is that better?”

There’s a moment of silence in which they stare at each other silently, the wind that whips around them the only witness to the way Virgil gazes at Logan expectantly and Logan stands there, his face as blank as an empty stone wall. Logan blinks.

It’s Virgil that breaks first, throwing his hands as far up in the air as he can manage with so much clothing on, which ends up only being a few inches above his shoulders. “You know what?” he shouts, “I give up. First you don’t know the ‘road work ahead’ vine and now—“

Before Virgil can finish his impassioned rant, however, there’s a shout, one that makes them both jerk their heads to the side in mirror images of each other. The world is just as white and still as it was a moment ago, with snow frosting the trees and encroaching on the edge of the lake, but the lake is no longer a pristine pane of frosted glass settled down into the snow; there’s a scratch on the glass, a little imperfection from which water splashes onto the surface of the lake.

Patton is nowhere to be found.

When they turn to each other in a moment of realization, Logan can see Virgil’s wide, frightened eyes clearly under his hood. Within an instant, they’re both off like a shot. Logan’s world seems to have fractured just like the ice, leaving disjointed bits and pieces of thoughts scattered around in his brain so that he can’t quite get a grip on anything coherent; instead, as he races through the snow, his experience allowing him to quickly outpace Virgil, he only gets quick snatches, little half-impressions that dissolve like the afterimages that hover in your vision after you look into a light that’s too bright. All he knows is that his heart feels hollow and concave despite the anatomical impossibility of the thing, that the cold air burns his lungs as he takes deep breaths to replenish the oxygen his body is using by running, that a sharp rush of adrenaline has flooded into his bloodstream. Whatever has overrun his brain, it’s unfamiliar. It pushes everything concrete out of his mind so that when he drops to his hands and knees to spread out his weight over a larger surface area, it is without thought. His body just _does_ it.

Crawling over Patton’s discarded camera, a lone black spot on the ice, he finally reaches the place where he’d fallen. The water kicks and bucks, a disorganized matrix of little waves and _he can’t see Patton how far down is he what if they can’t find him._

Logan is paralyzed until he sees a hand almost brush the surface. Catching it in a sturdy, sure grip, he scrambles forward, on his stomach now as he throws his other arm in the water and searches around until he finds something solid, and then he _tugs,_ using his legs to move backwards in an awkward wiggle. He’s not moving much. He’s not going to be able to do this on his own.

Just as he’s getting worried he won’t be able to drag Patton out of the water, something dark appears in the corner of his vision: Virgil. On his knees he has more leverage, and together they’re able to pull Patton up and onto the ice, where he curls over on his side to cough up water. “Get his clothes off,” Logan instructs, his voice strung all through with a brittle tension that lies just below the surface, a subtle but integral backbone to the sound. Ripping his gloves off and throwing them behind him, he gets to work on the zipper of Patton’s coat, peeling it off of him while Virgil goes for his shoes. Patton helps himself out of the sleeves.

He’s shivering violently, his hands oscillating in a wild and uncontrolled way that reminds Logan of an earthquake, his teeth chattering against each other with a staccato clacking noise unbounded by steady rhythm. Piece by piece, they get all his wet clothing off. Logan sets to work on his own coat.

As Logan guides Patton’s trembling arms into the sleeves of his coat, water drips from Patton’ hair in a thin little stream, falling past his eyelashes, which are beaded with tiny water droplets, and onto his nose, from which it drips still farther onto the dark fabric of Logan’s coat, which Logan finishes zipping up with cold fingers. “My camera,” Patton stutters. “Where’s my camera?”

“It’s fine, Patton,” Logan promises, despite not knowing if it’s true or not. “You’re gonna be just fine, okay?”

Virgil has managed to shuck off his outermost layer of pants, his boots lying besides Patton’s wet ones. Smiling despite himself, Logan helps tug them up to Patton’s waist. Of course he’s wearing more than one pair. But just because Patton has dry clothes doesn’t mean he’s out of danger. He’s still shaking like a flag in a summer storm, and the pair of socks Virgil is sacrificing for him is no replacement for the warm, sturdy boots that sit off to the side, their laces already beginning to freeze to the icy surface of the lake. “Patton,” Logan starts, placing his hands on his shoulders and looking straight into his deep, deep brown eyes, which are speckled with little streaks of heavy caramel and rich chestnut that you can’t quite make out through a computer screen, “we’re going to need you to walk back to the truck with us, okay?”

Patton nods even as he protests, “But my camera.”

“Virgil will get it. Come, now, let’s go,” he says, hoisting Patton up until he’s standing on shaky legs, one arm slung around Logan’s shoulders. Logan calls up the symptoms of hypothermia in his head. 

Patton continues to lean on him as they keep walking, Logan practically tugging him along behind him as he pushes through the snow. Patton can keep up, sure, but he trips and stumbles at times, and never moves his arm from where it’s settled firmly around Logan’s shoulders. _Unsteady walking or standing,_ Logan ticks off. 

The winter air bites through the lighter fleece jacket Logan always wears under his coat with millions of little scraping teeth that gnaw at his arms and bare hands as they struggle back over the rise, Virgil following close behind them like a hovering parent ready to jump in at the first sign of trouble. Logan smirks despite himself. They’re far, far past the first sign of trouble. 

As they walk, whatever force that had driven Logan’s heart to beat faster and his ribcage to feel like it was sinking in on itself is still strong, holding his body in an unfamiliar, irregular state that makes his thoughts jump from place to place in an irregular static and his hands buzz with thrumming energy and the quiet that is normally his faithful companion become an intrusion, a perverse inversion of the way things should be, a heavy storm cloud that gathers more weight each second it is left unpierced. He has to say something, has to, or else this will go on. Logan doesn’t know if he can bear to let this go on.

They need to go faster.

Before long, they’ve traded the open area around the lake for one sprinkled with a sparse collection of trees, each dark green branch weighed down by snow that sits heavy on the delicate spreads of coniferous needles. Trees are some of Patton’s favorite subjects, Logan remembers. Trees and people.

“Patton,” Logan insists, tired and strained, but patient, “I need you to move a little faster, okay? My truck is just a little bit farther, and when we get there we can start getting you warm.” Behind them, Virgil reaches out to place a gentle hand on Patton’s back, nudging him forward.

Patton takes a moment to answer. When he does, it’s with a slow little shrug that reminds Logan of the times when he’s seen him sad, all drained of energy and scraping at the last dredges of his resolve to keep going on cheerily, even if there’s no light behind his eyes and tears threaten to gather behind his wide, round rose gold glasses. “There’s no hurry. We’ll get there when we get there,” he says through his chattering teeth, but there’s something else there, too. There’s a laziness to the syllables, one that makes them flow and blend into each other at the edges, one that dissolves the ends of some words into nothing at all.

Apathy, slurred speech. Two mental check marks.

Logan gulps.

Finally, _finally,_ they catch sight of Logan’s truck through the trees, the black paint stark against the snow-covered ground, at which point Logan abandons any kind of pretense, wraps his cold, pale fingers around Patton’s wrist, and all but drags him the last few meters, leaving him to clumsily stumble behind Logan and draw a scrambling Virgil after them. As soon as Logan reaches the car door, he’s wrenching it open, throwing himself into the driver’s seat, punching the key in the ignition and cranking the dial for heat as far as it’ll go. With a shout of, “Get in the back with him, Virgil!” he yanks his seat belt down across his body and clicks it into place.

As soon as the car door shuts, he’s on his way home.

There are blankets and towels scattered all around the backseat; Virgil should be able to make use of them. Driving, it just isn’t enough. Logan wants to be back there, needs to be back there peeling Patton’s snowy socks off his feet and rolling up his pants so the wet parts don’t touch his skin, wrapping him in blankets and toweling off his hair and asking a litany of calculated questions and tucking Patton’s body into his warm arms, holding him tight as if he can squeeze the warmth back into him. Here, with his pale hands gripping the steering wheel hard enough to hurt, he can only get out a strangled, “How are you feeling?”

Patton chuckles. “Not my toes, that’s for sure!”

Cursing, Logan steps on the gas. Patton is going to be completely fine so long as he has anything to say about it.

It feels like millennia pass on the way back to Logan’s little research station. The sound of the vents forcing out hot air into the car fills his ears with static and drowns out the hushed conversation Virgil and Patton are having in the backseat. The country roads out here don’t get cleared, and so no matter how much Logan wants to drive like he’s on the freeway, slow will have to do it, just like it did when they left.

For the longest time, everything on the other side of the windshield is snow and trees, snow and trees, and Patton is freezing to death in the back of his car and all Logan can do is grit his teeth, set his shoulders in a tense line, grip the steering wheel like a lifeline, and listen for any noise from the backseat.

“Logan,” Virgil says, his voice just on the edge of a tremble, “he’s not shivering anymore.” 

All the sudden, Logan is the one that’s fallen into ice water. _“Shit,”_ he growls, but no sooner does the word leave his mouth than he catches sight of solar panels and dark brown siding; they’ve made it. Tearing himself out of his seatbelt and throwing open the door, Logan clambers out of his seat and onto the ground, where his feet plunge into the deep snow for scarcely a moment before he’s already running back to get Patton, scooping him right up into his arms and marching to the door with frantic anxiety covered in a thin shell of grim determination. Virgil rushes up with the keys, which Logan left in the car, and pushes past them to fumble with the lock.

He isn’t efficient enough, Logan thinks. Every fraction of a second Patton spends out here in the cold is another letter of his death sentence and yet Virgil can’t be bothered to unlock the door correctly. Patton is heavy. The strain of carrying him settles into the crevices of Logan’s muscles, pulls at his shoulders, presses tendons and bones in his back into a cramped cluster, but Logan pushes the sensation to the back of his mind, replacing it with the simple fact that he cannot, under any circumstances, let Patton go. So he digs his fingers into Patton’s borrowed clothing and waits for Virgil.

Finally, _finally,_ Logan hears the click of the lock twisting into place, sees the door swing away when Virgil uses a gentle hand to push it open. With no such time for being gentle, Logan stomps through the doorway, past the hooks where he hangs his coats and the mat where he puts his snowy boots and straight to the fireplace, where he sets still, cold Patton on the floor in front of the tired couch. “Virgil, make some tea,” he says, pulling blankets out of a cabinet, “and heat up some other water, too. There are mason jars in the cabinet under the sink, you can put it in there.”

Even though it has both a modern heating system and a fireplace, the little research station is a drafty little thing, full of cracks and crevices for cold air to sneak through and start a winding journey through the two rooms, sneaking along the floorboards and venturing through the doorway, taking refuge under the table in the kitchen, where it chills Logan’s feet on most days. Despite its faults, it’s the best place they have available. They’ll have to make do. 

When Logan turns back to Patton, it’s with a mountain of blankets piled up in his arms, quilts and heavy fleeces and something Logan suspects was once a picnic blanket all thrown together with other odds and ends the building has accumulated over the years. Patton likes them, says it’s like a story of all the people that have spent time here and what little pieces of themselves they left behind. The way he finds beauty in the most mundane things is worthy of awe.

Logan dumps the blankets on the floor to free up his hands and then settles down on his knees in front of Patton, who is staring at his bare feet with an apathy like dry grass. Patton is _soft._ He’s all gentle, round shapes and quiet words and smiles and light touches that paint a sharp contrast to Logan, who’s a compound of sharp, severe angles, a creature of blunt truths and steady routine marked with piercing eyes that search and analyze with crisp efficiency. Now, faced with Patton stripped down to his most vulnerable, Logan’s breath catches in his throat. For the first time in a long, long time, he hesitates.

Whenever life gets too stressful, Logan’s mind slips from his grasp and, without his direction, starts imagining Patton taking care of him. Patton’s warm hands sliding through his hair, Patton’s arms draped around his shoulders, Patton’s words building up around them to form a little protective cocoon that shelters them from the outside world and all its troubles. He’s done it before, as best he can through a computer screen, talked through everything unique and special about Logan until he has no choice but to let out little bits and pieces of his strangled grin. But Logan is the one doing the caretaking now.

He’s horribly, painfully out of his depth. All he can do is make sure Patton is safe. Whether he _feels_ safe and comfortable or not is something that Logan, no matter how hard he might try, simply can’t change.

He needs to start a fire. That’s one of the most important things he’ll do, but first, he’ll get Patton out of his coat. “Alright. Patton,” he says, his voice just a few degrees from shaky, “I am going to take your coat off, but I will replace it with blankets.” Patton nods, and Logan reaches forward, sorting through the folds and flaps in the fabric until he can grab hold of the zipper, pull it down, and then push the sturdy coat off his shoulders. His skin isn’t as warm as it should be.

Quickly, Logan selects his favorite blanket, the one he’s taken to sleeping with most nights. It’s a little small, but more than makes up for it with the soft, soft fleece that lines the underside, the kind that makes you want to tug it up around your neck and wear less clothing just so you can feel it against your skin. Patton all but melts into it, tugging the gray fabric tight around his shoulders as Logan throws another blanket over his legs and then hurriedly turns towards the fireplace, reaching up blindly to grab a lighter and handful of dryer lint before smoothly lighting it and tucking it under the logs with practiced efficiency.

Blankets, done. Fire, done. Until Virgil comes back with tea and hot water bottles, there’s only one source of heat left. Reassuring himself that it’s the most logical choice and that anything they have at their disposal should be used to its full potential, Logan starts the process of taking off his own layers of clothing, yanking the zipper of his black fleece down when it gets stuck and shucking his long-sleeved shirt off before blindly flinging it across the room, snatching up a blanket to drape across his shoulders, and pulling Patton into his lap. He winds his warm arms around Patton’s cold body, tugs him tight to his chest, and makes sure the blankets are trapping as much heat as possible.

Logan cannot remember the last time he’s been hugged. He’s even harder pressed to remember the last time he had hugged someone, but here, as Patton tucks his face into Logan’s shoulder and molds to his body in search of any last scraps of spare warmth, Logan can’t be bothered by the intimacy of the thing; he lets Patton cling to him without a second thought. “Logan,” Patton mumbles, his words still running into each other like melting snow, “can we lay down?”

“No,” Logan says, carefully shifting their little bundle of blankets, “Virgil is making some tea for you. We can certainly lean back against the couch, however.” He takes the opportunity to add the last few blankets. “Are your muscles feeling stiff?” Patton nods against his shoulders.

“Still can’t feel fingers and toes.” With a shaky sigh, Logan watches Virgil walk in from the kitchen, a mug of tea held carefully between his hands.

“Here, Patton” he says, crouching down besides them, “I got you some tea.” As they sit up, Patton worms his arms out of the bundle of blankets to accept the mug as Logan adjusts them accordingly, draping an obnoxious red one over Patton’s arms and around both of their necks, an insulating barrier to keep their combined body heat from escaping. Patton sighs as he wraps his fingers around the mug and carefully takes a small sip.

The fire has started up in earnest, now. Yellow and orange flames race over the logs, lapping at the ones that haven’t quite caught yet, and a blanket of coals bright like fall leaves covers the bottom. It throws a warm, flickering light on Patton’s face, one that reflects in the wavering shadows cast by his features and the warm mug of tea that he steadily sips. As Virgil walks away, his footsteps trace an anxious, uneven path back to the kitchen.

Patton’s skin is soft. Under the blankets, where they are still pressed together for warmth, Logan’s arms wind around Patton’s torso like creeping vines and their legs are tangled together like roots. There’s something about it that reminds Logan of finally getting to sit down and rest after a long day. It’s like when he opens his computer to find that Patton is online and immediately opens a video chat, a smile creeping its way onto his face as he thinks of getting to talk to him and listen to him, to prop his head up in his arms and let himself get lost in stories of all the people and things Patton encounters. Patton is here, and next to Logan, and despite the terrible circumstances it feels _good._

Patton drinks his tea quickly, setting the empty cup on top of the couch and wasting no time in pulling his hands back under the blankets, where he rests them in between their chests, surrounded by warmth. Time passes quietly. After a while, Patton starts to shiver again, a full body movement that leaves him quaking against Logan’s skin, his teeth chattering loudly in Logan’s ear, and even like this he still clings to Logan like he’ll dissolve if he doesn’t, his face still buried in the crook of Logan’s neck, where he moves it every once in a while in a way that Logan almost mistakes for an affectionate nuzzle, the kind he finds himself imagining at night, when there are no tables and charts and responsibilities to distract him. It’s in those moments, when only the darkness bears witness, that Logan finds himself wishing. It’s a futile thing, he knows, one that will only exaggerate the unpleasant feeling that gathers each time he talks to Patton, but no matter how hard he tries to lock it up in the back of his head, it always manages to sneak out in the dark.

Patton continues to shiver. Logan holds him tighter.

“Remember—remember when I called to tell you Virgil and I were gonna do a story on your research?” Patton stutters, his words all cut up into disjointed little segments by the way his teeth chatter. “Your eyes went all wide and you looked so happy, Logan.” A beat. “I like it when you’re happy.”

“Oh?” Logan says, his hand sneaking up to slide itself into Patton’s hair.

“Mm-hmm.” Patton’s breath brushes against Logan’s neck like butterfly wings. He’s so close after years and years of being so far away, and a traitorous little part of Logan wants to abandon his life and his passions to trail at Patton’s heels like a lost puppy, to follow him anywhere and everywhere, to pack up his things and move to his city this instant in a choice that would boldly defeat all the reasons they can’t be together.

He remembers racing across the ice little more than half an hour ago, his thoughts amorphous and vague, a scrambled collection of half-composed sentences that slipped through his fingers every time he tried to reach out and seize one. Patton does that to him, sometimes. It happens in moments when — Logan curls his hands into fists — thoughts are not their own entities, but part of a feeling.

Logan’s not good with feelings. They’re hard to categorize, to define, to pick apart and _understand._ He doesn’t like not understanding things. But there are a few things that he does know, even if he cannot make sense of the intricacies, the little gears and knobs and everything that makes them tick: he cares for Patton, and Patton cares for him. The feeling that’d overtaken him while he ran to Patton was not a pleasant one.

And so, with a cloud of things that he cannot understand hanging in his head like a half-formed thought, like a vivid dream you can’t quite remember when you wake up, like a word that sits on the tip of your tongue, Logan gathers his resolve, opens his mouth, and says, “Your well being is important, Patton.”

It’s painfully inadequate, but Patton seems to understand regardless. He lifts his head up from where it’s buried into Logan’s neck, looks into Logan’s eyes. “Logan,” he says, his brown eyes flicking back and forth, searching Logan’s for something. “Logan,” he says, leaning forward almost imperceptibly, the weight of his body shifting to press slightly harder against Logan’s chest, his hands moving to intertwine with Logan’s under the blankets, and with a tiny little movement, closes the gap between them and kisses him. He is still shivering.

Logan is caught at the edge of a precipice, at the moment just before something shifts off its center of balance and begins to tilt. He feels _full,_ somehow, but light, too, like someone has nestled a helium balloon in his chest cavity. Patton is kissing him. Patton is _kissing him,_ and he is kissing Patton, and they are pressed together under a mountain of blankets and Logan’s glasses aren’t an issue because Patton lost his in the lake, and Logan _feels_ so much, feels something vague and indescribable but undeniably good.

When Patton pulls away, Logan very nearly lets out a little squeak, but manages to simply stare at Patton like he’s a brand new discovery, breathtaking and delicate. Patton smiles. “I love you too, Logan.”

(Unbeknownst to them, Virgil stands in the doorway, a hot water bottle clutched in his hand.)

(He is smiling.)


End file.
